2015/12/08

Psychology of Testing

Mentality of testing specialist must be different from that of developer. Frankly speaking, programmers are quite capable of testing both their own handwritten code and functionality of the system they work upon.

But it is not for nothing that testing is performed by independent specialists – people tend to wrongly evaluate results of their own work.
Accordingly, a tester that is used to a certain degree of independence almost always will be more successful in detecting defects and inconsistencies in the system, than a programmer.

Software testing as service delivers solutions on how to carry out software testing to increase productivity, reduce costly errors and speed up time to market.

There are 4 levels of independence – from low to high:

Tests for software are developed and run by the person who builds this product;

Tests are developed and carried out by other people (for example, by another developer);

Tests are developed by representatives of other organizational group (for instance, from testing department) or by specialized testers (for example, performance testing or security testing specialists);

Tests are developed and performed by specialists from another organization (for example, outsourcing software testing company or audit firm).

Owing to their profession, testers are involved in assessing work of others, finding defects in it, that is why their activity is considered to be destructive despite that it is aimed at correcting errors and improving overall quality of the product.

Unlike a programmer, who primarily aims to create a functionally correct software product, a tester must be able to identify all existing defects in this product. And for this purpose, we need to focus on the thing that may go wrong.

Here is one more important moment: when writing bug reports, be impersonal and in no case do name the person who is guilty of this error since you will still have to work with programmers.

You are recommended to consider several pieces of advice on how to communicate effectively with your colleagues:

Do always remember that you work upon the same project and follow the same goal that is to create quality and demandable software product;

Put yourself in other people’s place and try to understand the reasons of their behavior;

Focus only on facts;

Always make sure that another person clearly understands you and you clearly understand him.